Tuesday, February 9, 2010

Postabon

Postabon

Looking for the best bargain or good deals near your area? If you’re like me, checking the best deals on the Web everyday, then one of the sites you must check out is Postabon.

At first glance, I thought Postabon is one of the sites for finding coupons online, but a second look I found that this site works a bit differently from some other sites in that you can find best deals based on the “location” you select.

Postabon, co-founded by three Harvard students in 2009, is currently offers best deals mainly in the categories of eat, shop, entertainment and misc. Although you can enter your zip code and get results for the best deals in your area, but most of the deals are located in NYC.

As the domain name suggests, this site allows the users to “post a bon”, and in the Postabon system, bon is the alternative name for the best deal. However, unlike other best deal sites that aggregate deals across the Web, all the bons appeared on the site are indeed posted by the users. Besides the deal listings, Postabon also assigns a personal profile to each user, in an attempt to build up a reliable and trusted deal finders community. Of course, as a user, you can give deals the thumbs up or down as well as search the bons by numerous methods, such as city name, zip code, or based on categories or top rated that being offered.

Also, for those iPhone users, the Postabon app can gives you the best deals based on your GPS location.

Postabon Deal

BuySellAds

Buy Sell Ads logo

For bloggers, if you want to build your blog and making it a cash profit machine for you, BuySellAds is definitely a great advertisement network besides Google AdSense.

BuySellAds, actually they are now increasingly popular for the bloggers especially in the Web design and development niche. Currently, there have attracted nearly 1,400 blogs as their publishers in which they used BuySellAds as the ads network to sell advertising banners onto their sites. While it’s free to sign-up and use BuySellAds, but you must add a Web property, i.e. your blog’s URL address and get their approval before you are allowed to set up the ad zones onto your site.

It’s important to note that not every blog are qualified as the publishers of BuySellAds. For those who have rejected by BuySellAds, although the blog you’re running is occupied by rich content and high traffic. Perhaps what you can do now other than wondering about why you’ve been rejected via a standard reply email, you can visit this forum thread and learn more about their selection criteria:

…actually in we are #1 in our main vertical which is web design/development, this means it’s easier for us to find an advertiser for someone interested in this niche. We’re sketching up new verticals in the near future.

Bottom point is, although you’re site might have been fantastic, we try our best to keep our publishers happy.

On the other side, once you blog has been approved, BuySellAds will then acts as a broker between you blog and the pool of advertisers. On the downside, however, they do take a slightly larger cut of the cost of the ads. For instance, if the cost of your ad is $10 (the minimum you can price your ad), BuySellAds will cut 25% as the fee of their service, and the remaining $7.50 will be your payout. In the meantime, you can choose the payment option to be PayPal, Check or Wire Transfer.

Overall, BuySellAds is a perfect ad network should you decide to give it a try.

Tweexchange

Tweexchange Logo

I have said before the use of Twitter today are more than just status update. In a world where so many tweeters turn to use Twitter for advice, gauge feedback, input, and even breaking first hand news, it’s not easy to grab the prefer username for new Twitter users if they want to make a Twitter presence.

In fact, a new trend has emerged where businesses started to use Twitter as a mean to build a new trustworthy relationships with their customers also contributed to the fact that picking up the username of your first choice would be not easy. Additionally, Google is already indexing tweets. In other words, a SEO (Search Engine Optimization)-friendly username that best reflect the purpose of your Twitter use can help your tweets for future search indexing.

Just like domain name, SEO-friendly Twitter username is scarce since anyone can quickly sign up for Twitter. For this reason, a new app namely Tweexchange has been developed to help you get the most out of the available usernames. To its credit, Tweexchange also will notify you when a Twitter username becomes available again, though a $5 one-time fee is applying, see the below picture.

Tweexchange Search Result

Foursquare

Foursquare

Think 50% friend-finder, 30% social city guide, 20% nightlife game. This is one of the slogans that location-based social network Foursquare when it first launched on the Web. Now, Foursquare has became a full-fledged social application that allows you to update your current status as well as finding out what your friends are doing nearby through variety of smartphone applications such as iPhone, Blackberry, Palm and even the Android app.

To encourage users to connect to their friends based on location, Foursquare awards points and unlocked badges. For instance, a user can unlock the “Newbie” badge for being the first time to check in by using Foursquare, and after you checking in ten (10) different venues, you’ll earn yourself a “Adventurer” badge. Want more? Try to check in the same place three times in a week, you’re a “Local,” and if you make thirty (30) checkins in a month, then you’re a “Super User.” In addition, you can track your achievements in your own dashboard in order to find out the number of your Nights Out” and any mayorship you entitled to by being the first to visit a new place.

At its core, Foursquare does the two most important things in location-based social network: it displays your personal lifestream, which essentially your location updates and helps you to find new ways to explore the city. Meanwhile, it also helps to connect to your friends in a better way via geolocation in a number of ways like send a “Shout” to your friends, add any tip to a city where you and your friends enjoy together and create a “to-do list” among the group of your buddies.

Fliggo: Create Your Video Blog

fliggo

Video blogging is becoming a phenomenon and its attributes to the fact that the appealing effect that people who view the videos and sympathize with the content especially the video itself is surrounding in a sad story.

However, video blogging has not really taken off as there are few factors such as it’s time consuming to produce a truly compelling video and yet it’s also not easy to create a video blog. But we still notice that most of the mainstream entertainments are wired with video blogging.

To arm you with the video blogging software and hence, you can create your very own YouTube in seconds, Fliggo is a right tool to go for. In fact, it’s inexpensive to create a video blog and become a video blogger on Fliggo.

On Fliggo, you’ve the options to describe your niche video blog title. Also, you can opt to keep your videos private by selecting the closed membership so only the people you invited can view your video blog. Meanwhile, there are few design templates offered by Fliggo, and you can play with it now with the basic account (without paying a hefty premium). But in near future, a premium account type called Fliggo Pro; proposed $50 per month will be launched and many added features such as custom domain name, advanced customization tools are built into the package.

rssa: Really Simply Syndicate Anything

RSS (Really Simply Syndication) is a technology underpinning the popularity of blogging as well as a way to publish and subscribe to blog entries. However, it is unsurprised to learn that many sites still did not have a feed. For the site owners who built their sites not by using the blogging software; the static one, a Web app called rssa (Really Simply Syndicate Anything) can help to solve the RSS creation process.

By entering your Web site’s URL to rssa’s feed URL bar, this service will create a feed for your site through a quick and easy few steps manner. You can set options such as create a feed widget or alerts widget and place the widget onto your site. On the upside, rssa allows you to create a feed based on the category pages, or search pages of your site, but if this service can’t create the feed simply because it couldn’t find any suitable data on the page your specified, you’ll find it isn’t always “Really Simply Syndicate Anything.”

Apparently, rssa functions similar to FeedYes, another service helps to create a feed automatically. However, on a side note, I ran a simple test to create a feed for a static site, but the outcome shown that FeedYes gives you the ability to create the feed based on the static site’s page headline that has news value whereas rssa failed to take care of this.